Why Chinese Mothers are Not Superior (from a female Chinese engineer)

"The asian kid with a 1560 SAT and state violin awards (probably) isn't getting into Harvard"

18% of Harvard students are Asian, so yeah, he (probably) would. And, that's with a long-standing policy of "ethnic cleansing" in Asian matriculation[1].

[1]http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2008/2/19/affirmatives-of-...

Anecdote is not the singular form of data.

You've never met any neurotic, therapy-prone Jews?

A friend of mine, a mother of a gifted 5th grader wrestling with similar issues of parental control as Amy Chua, shared the WSJ article with me today. It reminded me of something Steven Pinker writes about in one of his books. In his book, he breaks down the work of Judith Rich Harris (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Rich_Harris) to this formula:

Genes have 50% influence over a child's development, peers 40%-50%, parents the rest.

Harris's work is strongly disputed, yes. But Chua's article seems to strangely confirm it.

By micromanaging her children's social interactions in a number of different ways, she wrests back a significant measure of influence back from their potential peers. I told my friend to note Chua's list of things she never lets her kids do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

Notice these are all activities that would potentially expand the influence of her kids' peers and undermine her totalitarian regime.

Chua probably believes that its her strictness and strong principles that are leading her children to excel. And these have their role, no doubt. But I would propose, following Harris, it is her oppressive control of their social lives which is the much stronger factor.

An interesting extension of her social experiment will be when it's time for her kids to go to college (the photo accompanying the article indicated they haven't quite got there yet.) Sure, they'll probably go to an Ivy League school, maybe even Yale where their mother is a professor, so it won't be complete culture shock.

Nevertheless: do her kids find peers who sustain their carefully disciplined social lives? Does mom continue to try to control their lives at a distance? Do they thrive with additional freedom? Or do they crack under it?

*Edited for formatting and spelling.

This is not intended to exactly disagree: Many times when people cite the Maslow hierarchy, they often to take it as an axiom that the hierarchy is completely exactly how people work, and to lead better lives, people must go about fulfilling exactly these needs in this order.

As someone who presumably subscribes to the hierarchy, would you agree that you seem fairly certain that this is how it works? And, if so, can you say why?

At minimum, I'd say that it's not obvious to me that the order specified by the hierarchy is really in evidence. For example, I believe I've witnessed a fair number of people I'd say were self-actualized and esteemed who are fairly short on the friendship/family/sexual-intimacy front.